I don’t have time to fisk it properly, but here’s yet another jeremiad against life extension. And note what is missing (as usual). Hint: it’s a very terracentric viewpoint. These people are the new Ptolemists.
22 thoughts on “You Go First”
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I sure hope I get to live a couple hundred years and have time to worry about it. I don’t see enough 90-130 year olds yet to think it’s gotten to be a problem.
I wonder if Mr. Weiner’s mom, if she is still living, is glad that he thinks she ought to pop off to stop ‘wasting’ the ‘earth’s’ resources. For that matter, I’m offended that he thinks my mom ought to.
Unfortunately, there is a real point here – the one made all those years ago by Malthus. If human life expectancy becomes indefinite (it doesn’t matter how healthy you are if you are struck by lightning, so it will never become infinite) then unless children are born at extremely long intervals the human population will become unsupportable by Earth – especially as energy consumption (for example) per capita continues to increase despite all our best efforts.
This doesn’t really change much even if we expand into the solar system. Here, the limit is larger (much larger!) but exponential growth has a habit of overcoming such changes in available resources.
Even interstellar flight wouldn’t help much more. Give it long enough, and we would run into the speed-of-light limit for expansion.
The problem is exponential growth. Even 2% growth per year, compounded, adds up.
There is a solution to this that puts it off a little longer – personality upload.
Rand, are you sure you aren’t knocking Ptolemy unfairly? As far as I know all he did and intended to do was essentially a curve-fit: his model was intended to predict the motion of the planets to within the measurement accuracy of the day and he succeeded in that. He empirically derived the first few coefficients of a Fourier expansion. I don’t think he thought there were actual mechanical constructions in the heavens that made the planets move that way, though those were a convenient way to calculate/simulate them (Antikhytera mechanism) on Earth.
Your criticism probably does apply to some of Ptolemy’s mindless followers.
Incidentally, the heliocentric model was known to the ancients, and Aristotle even discusses it. But because the Greeks couldn’t detect any stellar parallax, he concluded that either the Earth was the center of the universe or the fixed stars were exceedingly far away. Using what we now call Occam’s razor he chose the first explanation, which seemed simpler to him.
Weiner whines about life extention because like all doctrinaire progressives he’s oh so concerned about the potential unfairness of it all with the rich benefiting first. Wait, it’s an article from the once great (a generation ago) now progressive polemic Newsweek. Case dismissed.
If human life expectancy becomes indefinite (it doesn’t matter how healthy you are if you are struck by lightning, so it will never become infinite) then unless children are born at extremely long intervals the human population will become unsupportable by Earth
You’re amazing, Ken. You solve problems as fast as you find them! Just in case, anyone missed what happened, here’s a template for the above sort of comment.
Problem: X is a problem unless we do Y.
Solution: Do Y.
Malthusian equilibrium is likely to be the state to which human population on Earth returns, regardless of whether life extension occurs or not. The current disequilibrium in developed countries will end as those who have a predisposition to have larger families outbreed those who do not.
It’s my understanding that as affluence increases, birth rates decline. This is most manifest in modern Europe where the TFR (Total Fertility Rate: number of children born per woman) is below replacement. A society of pseudo-immortals will have to have a VERY high degree of affluence, and hence are unlikely to have a high, or even significant, birth rate.
And then there’s the fact that the Earth is nowhere near its carrying capacity yet. Antarctica, Canada, Siberia, the oceans, all can be colonized given enough energy (nuclear and orbital solar being the only plausible sources). Given decent cheap energy and secure property rights, we’re unlikely to ever hit a Malthusian limit, even without extra-planetary colonies.
“Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded–here and there, now and then–are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.” – L.L./R.A.H.” I can’t do better than this bit of wisdom.
Jason, I once read a rather old SF story in which life extension had become commonplace and cheap (by some method that is obvious once found but we haven’t discovered it yet) and the society was also a theocracy that thoroughly disapproved (as in life imprisonment for using it) of contraception. I think you can imagine the results.
This is far from impossible. Nanotech-based life extension does not have to cost very much at all. And no matter how efficient things get a human needs about 200W of power to stay alive.
Karl, what would a society dominated by people a thousand plus years old be like?
A society of Elves… Minus the pointy ears probably.
If human life expectancy becomes indefinite (it doesn’t matter how healthy you are if you are struck by lightning, so it will never become infinite) then unless children are born at extremely long intervals the human population will become unsupportable by Earth –
http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/2010/06/western-civilisation-relentlessly.html
Gee, guys. The problem appears to resolve itself on it own. Ya think?
Nothing here. Move along now.
There are interesting answers to Fletcher’s questions, but probably not the type he’s looking for. To take them in reverse order:
A society that *has* many 1,000+ years old people will not be necessarily dominated by them, especially if they find something else to do. Domination is a crude way of getting a testosterone fix. Testosterone goes up after successful self-assertion, and it makes you feel good. The coarse self-assertion of dominating others creates unwanted secondary results though, like assassination, and those have real downsides, which people learn about as they age. There are many subtler ways of asserting yourself, and people tend to learn them more, the longer they live.
As to combining infinite lifespan with a theocracy,… while not theoretically impossible, the ability to sustain a political hierarchy based on scriptural literalism at the level of technology needed for a non-aging population is very small. The technical literacy needed to maintain that level of technology will obviate most scriptural literalist creeds. That is no small reason why so many scriptural literalists are agin’ life extension technologies.
As to the desire people have for children, that would make for an exponential growth rate,…it is an expression of the oxytocin cycles in humans. A cute baby brings gushing good feeling and a bonding tendency to most humans most of the time. That comes from the rise in oxytocin that seeing a “baby face” stimulates in humans. The answer to such a trend is to find other things that do the same thing, from encouraging activities that bond us with other people, all the way up to genetic reprogramming that allows other activities to stimulate oxytocin, and beyond.
Positing only *one* change in humans, when it is as large as extreme long life, is always somewhat willfully blind. Science fiction writers do that, because it lets them write about a society which their readers can identify with. Still, in discussing futures, we should be aware that *no* one change will ever dominate human existence, and all the pronouncements that something will, make little difference in the end.
Karl, me?
human population will become unsupportable by Earth
Illogical. Define unsupportable? Human population is a regulated system.
Ken –
Precisely. Exponential growth supported by arithmetic growth (or even exponential with a lower factor) always leads to a crash. And population crashes are not pretty. Deliberate regulation is necessary to avoid this.
Tom – It wouldn’t have to be scriptural literalist. That would do the job, but it isn’t necessary. The attitude of the Catholic Church, if actually followed, would do fine.
“Jonathan Weiner! You’ve just won free tickets to Disney World! Go as often as you like for the rest of your life.”
“Naw, The lines are too long, it’s too hot and humid in the summer and the tea cups make me sick.”
Meet ‘The Amazing Depress-o’ the man that can find pain an suffering in humanities greatest achievement.
I just wanted to point out what my 92 year old Grandmother once said to me, “Getting old sucks, I have so much to do, but my body just doesn’t work anymore.”
Also just because we solve aging doesn’t mean people will live forever. Accidence and Violence will still happen. I figure statistically you probably only have 700 years before you get hit by lighting.
Ryan, I once did a calculation on just that question, and you’re pretty close. If only accidents killed humans, then their life expectancy at birth would be about 750-1000 years. This assumes that those aged 500 would be no more vulnerable to accidents than those aged 50, but then again it also assumed they’d be no wiser and more careful.
Another interesting calculation is that if a cure for all types of cancer were found, human life expectancy would rise roughly 10 years. Bet you thought much more, huh? But there are so many ways to die, as it turns out.
The comment about interval of baby births is strange to me. As far as I can tell, most people make a certain number of babies, as opposed to reproducing at certain intervals. I see people talking about wanting 3 children or wanting to stop after 2, but I don’t see people saying well it’s been 3 years since we had a child, best have another one now. As a rule, people have the number they want to have early on, at close (2-3 year) intervals — and then stop. Occasionally you get the bonus baby, of course, but that’s not usually planned.
And since most people are done with child-bearing by age 35 or so — and the continue to live another 35 years without wanting to have more children, I’m not sure I see the difference if they live another 350 or even 3500 years. After all, if every person has one child, you have a stable population, regardless of whether each person lives 35 years or 3.5 million. (It’s true that in periods of transition, when lifespan or fecundity is changing, you can have temporary increases or decreases.)
The article in inherently stupid, of course, and this can easily be seen by considering lifespan reduction. Would life be better if we returned to a life expectancy of 40 years? If this answer is obviously not then the answer to the question of whether life would be better if we had a life expectancy of 400 years is obviously yes. The answers have to be consistent.
In fact, however, I kind of suspect that whatever human lifespan was, it would be just as bitter to be mortal as it is right now. I don’t think anyone contemplating his death at age 350 is going to be more philosophical than someone today contemplating the same at age 75. Death is death. No amount of living can make it easier. (It’s true, however, that old and sick people may find it less distressing to die than those who are young and healthy, in part because it promises relief from endless suffering. But that’s no argument that longer life makes death easier — it just says that life can become so awful that death becomes not that much uglier an alternative.)
A few somewhat disconnected thoughts.
First, since we are grabbing really broad guesses about the future, I’ll make one. Almost everything that looks like an exponential curve turns out in the long run to be a S-curve. This will turn out to be the case for human population on the earth even allowing for life extension, and this will also turn out to be the case for the increase in computing power and speed, probably eliminating the chance that we’ll be able to upload ourselves into something more compact and efficient than the human brain.
Second, I’m with the people who observe that life extension is not the same as immortality. Will McCarthy (sci fi writer) described it as ‘immorbidity’ not immortality (I don’t know if that is original with him).
Finally, I’d sure like to live longer even though I’m religious. I’m not going to go to the mat to argue about scriptural literalism right here, but it’s worth pointing out that the Old Testament casually described people living hundreds and hundreds of years. If you take that at face value, it seems that it didn’t generally make life really different than today except I get the idea you kind of lose track of who your descendants are unless you keep careful records. I thought Carl’s estimate of life expectancy at 750-1000 years especially interesting, because that range matches quite well with some of the older living people described in Genesis. If memory serves the ones who made it past about 200 usually made it past 400, and nobody listed made it past 1000. Maybe there weren’t as many nasty diseases back then or those long-ago ancestors didn’t age as quickly. I actually figure Genesis gives a reason to think that people can actually live a lot longer and society doesn’t collapse as a result. There were a lot fewer people thousands of years ago, but my guess would be that it’s kind of premature to worry about too little aging when the current death rate is still 100% of the people born within, say 140 years of birth. Start issuing warnings when we have ten 140+ year olds in the country.
It’s my understanding that as affluence increases, birth rates decline.
Affluence evidently acts as an analogue of pesticides(*). Eventually, this will lead to the emergence of resistant strains of humans that reproduce at high rates even when affluent.
(*) This is not to say that humans are pests, just that an analogy exists.
Almost everything that looks like an exponential curve turns out in the long run to be a S-curve.
Which then turns out to be part of a bell curve… hmmm… that’s a depressing thought.
I think Methusalah made it almost to a thousand, then died in the year of the flood or the year before… memory fails me.
Carl, what I meant was a long interval between births in society as a whole, not for any individual or couple.
To get a steady state of population the birth and death rates have to be the same. Take an example of an average lifespan of 1000 years – roughly 15 times the current. This necessarily means a death rate 15 times less per year than current. And this means a birth rate in the general population 15 times less. Seeing a preteen kid on the street would be rather rare. You could probably go a week between seeing babies.
Even for an individual or couple, this still applies. Assume that you meet the love of your life aged 50 (and still healthy and fertile of course). You get busy having your 2 kids at the shortest possible interval, and by your age 70 they are grown up. Your reproductive years are done, and you still have another 930 years to go. Averaged over these two people’s lifespans, the birth rate is very low indeed.
Karl, what would a society dominated by people a thousand plus years old be like?
Many massively multiplayer games have this sort of problem. People who come in later have a significant disadvantage over those who were playing from the start. They have less assets, power, etc at their starting point compared to established players. The games also traditionally get rebalanced so that early opportunities which were imbalanced become fixed yielding fewer opportunities for the newcomers.
Yet a number of new players end up beating out the older players through greater ambition, reading up on the current winning strategies (which the old players may have taken months to figure out the good strategies), and just playing while older players drop out.
In other words, we see this sort of thing now in microcosms of human society. It’s a problem that we’re already finding solutions to.